this has to be illegal.

like, no, seriously. i’m not a lawyer but i was working on a (since failed) startup in 2018 and distinctly remember how much headache the gdpr caused. literally one of the main things was that you cannot coerce users into consenting to data processing, or make features conditional to them. the gdpr makes a distinction between processing you do to perform a contract (that’s why no one asks for your consent for processing your email address to log you in, that’s implied) and processing you do for other reasons, which require user consent (that’s why everyone asks if they can spam you on the same email – it doesn’t matter that your email address is already on their server, processing it for marketing reasons requires consent of the data subject). opting into these kinds of processing needs to be granular, if it’s not they lose the validity of your consent.

i seriously hope facebook gets slapped so hard over this that no one ever thinks about doing this again. “paying with your data” should never be a thing in any society that calls itself civilized.

the only mass solution i found to this was that i installed pgadmin, logged into the db, and manually removed all the bot accounts from local_user. you should also remove them from the person table as well (you can easily find them if you do SELECT * FROM person WHERE local = true ORDER BY published DESC in the query tool), that way they don’t show up in your instance stats, but removing them from local_user would be enough to stop them from logging in.

It’s not really possible as long as Lemmy is a website. E2EE works on Matrix because it’s an app, and therefore it can manage your encryption keys in ways a browser cannot do for you. (You can save things in the client, but not in a reliable enough way for something like the master key for every communication you ever had that if you lose you get locked out of all your chat history.) In the case of Lemmy, the signing keys for your federated actions are handled by the server, which is perfectly fine for 99% of what you use Lemmy for (public posts and comments), but it also means that even if they implemented E2EE for chats, the keys to decrypt the convo would be right on the same server.

That’s why Lemmy actively pushes you to set up a Matrix account, because Matrix makes better tradeoffs for the purposes of messaging, while Lemmy’s tradeoffs are more relevant to a link aggregator style social media.

i find their asking price fair tbh. yeah, it’s not competitive spec-wise, but it’s what they have to do to keep up their model. they’re not big enough to make their own components like screens or have someone make a screen just for them, so they need to find components that will be available for seven years. fair trade materials are also more expensive because all that slave labor and shit does give the not so fair alternatives an edge in the market. the r&d cost for a small phone manufacturer is also spread across fewer units, components also cost more when you’re ordering them in smaller amounts, supporting the phone for seven years has its associated costs (on top of not having your customers buy phones 2-3x more frequently), and the sustainable business model does also have overhead compared to riding the razor on the stock market or being VC-funded.

the fairphone is not cheap, but if you care about what they do, care about actually owning your phone (both in terms of rooting and os access, and in terms of hardware access and repairability), and would like to be able to use it for a long time, this is just what it takes. if apple or samsung or google made a fairphone, it would cost less due to their scale, but it would still cost more than the phone you have with the 888. but if you can feel a single-gen upgrade there, you’d likely want to upgrade at a higher frequency anyway.

from what i’ve seen, some people do use phones the way you do, but a lot of people only swap phones when needed. for them, a fairphone that they can keep for 5-7 years and keep alive even if something happens to it could still be cheaper than the 2-3 other phones they’d need over the same period of time.

it’s worth noting that while on android you can be like 4-5 major versions behind and still receive first class app support, on ios apple decides your phone no longer sparks joy and refuses you the next ios version, you’re slowly but surely going to lose all your apps. on the developer side, apple is extremely hostile to the practice of using older versions of their apis, they constantly push you toward newer apis that only work with the latest os and discourage using the older ones. some apps, like vlc, still manage to support older iphones, but it’s an ordeal and a half, so on the user side, not being on the latest ios isn’t really a proper experience.

the iphone 6s was actually the longest supported iphone, receiving the latest ios for 83 months after release. that’s just one month shy of fairphone’s 7 years. however, the average iphone only gets five years of real-world viability*, which is, yes, better than the 2-3 years android gets (usually with way more transparently planned obsolescence than apple does), but it’s not better than the 7 years of true viability that fairphone offers. they upgraded to android 13, that alone would last you until 2026 because of the way android apps are written.

*yes, you can use your iphone past that, hell, you can even use it after you stop getting security fixes, which tends to happen about 3 years later. but how is that different than using an old android device that’s also not receiving support?

my current phone has the same soc and there are absolutely no issues there. will report back once i get my fairphone 4, hopefully tomorrow

if you’re not gaming on your phone (and if you are, 1. why, 2. get a steamdeck), i honestly don’t see how you would notice the soc. the only time i ever noticed that my phone was weak in the past five years (and my current phone is the only one that was low-mid-range, not actual low-end, save for an iphone se 3rd gen i had for half a year) was during zooming into an abnormally large upscaled r/place image. a phone’s performance is not really something that should be a consideration for the average user nowadays, anything can run basic apps that should have been websites and play back video. the mid-tier 2021 soc in the fairphone 4 definitely qualifies.

if the complaint is about the fairphone 3, then absolutely fair, i do remember that that one did manage to be hella slow. i wanted one back then and it was one of the major issues.

the fairphone 5 is rumored to come out this year, hopefully it will address those issues

Matrix, which is pretty much an encrypted and open-source Discord clone (at least in the same fashion as Lemmy would be a Reddit clone). I personally use Element to interact with it and have a matrix.org account, but Matrix is just like the fediverse, you can choose any instance or client you want, or even host an instance yourself. In your Lemmy settings you can set up your Matrix user, right below your email address as of 0.18.1, and if you do, a new buttons saying “send secure message” will show up on your profile, next to “send message”, which will redirect people trying to message you to Matrix.

google does seem to be the main culprit, but facebook still played a role as far as i’m aware. these two companies also colluded a lot so i wouldn’t trust either of them with anything federated

i mean, the root comment of this chain literally says “how about we defederate them because / not because”. it’s not exactly an unrelated topic.

whether or not it’s okay to defederate from someone just because they’re evil is a good question though, but i still don’t think it’s an ad hominem. an ad hominem, in the popular understanding and in the sense presented in your pyramid chart, is a fallacy of devaluing an argument because of the one who said it. it’s like i said “i don’t believe gravity exists because it’s the zuck who said it”, not “i don’t trust the zuck as a person and therefore don’t want to work with him”.

i think the argument you present here takes ad hominem to an absurd extreme, where literally any discussion of a person would become an ad hominem. it could technically fit a definition of an ad hominem, and yeah, a lot of arguments are just arguments of definition where we posit that the other person discusses the topic with our own definitions, by which they’re obviously wrong. so to avoid that, yeah, under this definition it would be an ad hominem, but under this definition it means little that something is an ad hominem, discussing a person doesn’t automatically devalue an argument.

the thing that earned ad hominem its low spot on your pyramid are the incorrect and baseless conclusions inherent in the former definition presented here, not the mere presence of a person in the argument. your latter definition is definitely valid, but it’s unconventional and isn’t consistent with the pyramid.

yep, it’s important that we have this capability, but it’s also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative

Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol. And that’s what all of this boils down to, trust. Do we trust Meta with not exploiting all of our data, and turning it against us at the earliest opportunity? Do we trust Meta that they want to contribute to the fediverse, and not just hurt it because it’s a competitor?

By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem. But at the end of the day, it’s just practical. Meta has a long and not so proud history of being extremely anti-consumer, and shoving that track record under the rug, trying to absolve them of responsibility and consequences for their actions, under the thought-terminating cliche of an ad hominem is neither productive nor practical.

Yes, people are mad at Meta, and yes, the distrust means their actions are scrutinized more than they otherwise would be, but that doesn’t mean that their actions aren’t actually massively anti-consumer, and that they aren’t a massive liability. In this particular case, you can make the argument that they had a legal obligation to hand over the data, had they not tried to build a walled garden with no privacy they wouldn’t have had the data to hand over to begin with.

(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the ![](https://image_url) syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)

my understanding was that while google is the main culprit, facebook and google both played a big part in killing it. but since we’re discussing meta/facebook here, and they’re not blameless, i focused on that.

but yeah, fuck google too.

they can also scrape them. that’s not really the point.

people can dm on lemmy, and only the two instances that host the people on either end of the dm (which may even be the same instance) store that dm. that instance may actually receive a subpoena. but all of this is heavily discouraged by the lemmy interface itself, instead prompting people to set up a matrix account instead, and matrix chats are end-to-end encrypted.

yeah, the difference is pretty stark:

• lemmy: we’ll give you a way to dm anyone on site, but please don’t use that, if you set up an app on this other open source service we’re not affiliated with (which is basically an encrypted discord) we’ll do our best to make it as seamless for you as possible. we’ll keep warning you for your own privacy.
• meta/facebook: aggressively keeps you on-platform for spying purposes; literally killed xmpp a decade ago and they’ll fuckin do it again (if we let them)

They trust me. Dumb fucks.

- Mark Zuckerberg

(yes it sounds like satire but that’s a real quote)